Your Toyota analogy doesn't hold up. If a customer puts SMR into their NAS, they are absolutely going to call Synology and complain. And they are going to have to re-explain this over and over because most people don't understand nascent HDD writing modes the way they do a vehicle tire. Even then, and appropriate analogy would be a tire that is cheap and new but refuses to spin above 25mph vehicle speed.
First, I don't think that's true. It could even be a FAQ on their website:
Q: Why is my brand new WD drive so slow in my NAS?
A: Because they lied to you and sold you junk. Here are the details...
It would be very easy to push the blame onto the vendor, where it belongs, because the defect is 100% with the drive and not at all with Synology. They don't have any control over it. Synology could even automate this. Whenever you insert a drive that isn't on their compatibility list, it prompts you with a message to make sure you want to proceed. They could very easily make that popup say something like "WARNING: THIS HARD DRIVE MODEL IS DEFECTIVE. WE STRONGLY URGE YOU TO REMOVE IT AND REPLACE IT WITH A DRIVE ON OUR COMPATIBILITY LIST."
But in any case, dealing with those support requests has to be way cheaper than the enormous financial and reputational loss they seem to be taking from this boneheaded move.
SMR drives aren't defective though. They have a capacity and they are capable of storing at that capacity. They just can't keep up with the throughout requirements of a nas. And remember the WD SMR scandal was because they weren't being forthcoming about that limitation. I fully support Synology's move to lock it drives. I think it's the tech crowd that got it wrong... mostly. Synology should have sweetened the deal and along with the lock-in, offered cheaper prices with proof of purchase of the Disk Station.
I know several folks who bought these drives as NAS drives, for NAS use, when they were not all the same. Folks could have just bought SMR drives from WD, but specifically bought NAS drives.
Western Digital's denial, and the fact it took a class action lawsuit, were enough that WD no longer sells WD RED, only WD Red+ and WD Red Pro.
SMR drives don't work well for NAS'. SMR is useful for things other than NAS storage which is on all the time.
Rebuilding a NAS because things overlap so much takes a lot longer with SMR drives, compared to CMR. SMR drives used in NAS formation seem to fail more too.
Building any kind of NAS with SMR drives is asking for trouble and pain. I guess SMR drives could be proactively replaced, would need to factor that into the cost / tco.
They're defective by design when advertised as NAS drives. It was impossible for them to work as users expected given their construction. It wasn't defective in the sense that there was a manufacturing flaw that made some of them fail, but in the sense that it was inherently unfit for purpose. If you design a car's brakes to fall off when they get hot so as to protect the braking system at the expense of the car, even if it works as designed, it's still defective.
I don't know how to reply to the rest. If you think it's a good idea for Synology to make their systems not work with even known-good drives from reputable manufacturers, I don't think there's likely to be a common ground we can find to discuss it further.
